“Boogie Woogie”

Composed by Clarence “Pinetop” Smith; arranged by Deane Kincaide.

Recorded by Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra for Victor on September 16, 1938 in New York.

Tommy Dorsey, first and solo trombone, directing: Charlie Spivak, first trumpet; Aniello “Lee” Castaldo, and John “Yank” Lawson, trumpets; Les Jenkins and Muni “Moe” Zudekoff (Buddy Morrow), trombones; John H. Muenzenberger (Johnny Mince), first clarinet; Hymie Shertzer, Freddie Stulce, Deane Kincaide, clarinets; Arthur “Skeets” Herfurt, tenor saxophone; Howard Smith, piano; Carmine Mastrandrea (Carmen Mastren), guitar; Gene Traxler, bass; Maurice “Moe” Purtill, drums.

The story:

Very few swing era bandleaders chose to shake-up their bands periodically, preferring instead to allow their ensembles to evolve more slowly, so as to minimize the disruptions caused by major changes of personnel. Tommy Dorsey was probably the bandleader who rather frequently fired and/or replaced less dramatically various musicians in his bands because he wanted changes in his band’s presentation to be effectuated more quickly. Perhaps it would more accurate to say that TD was constantly seeking to add new dimensions to the music his band played. This required new approaches to what music they would present in their day-to-day repertoire. These new approaches required new musicians with new (to the Dorsey band) sensibilities. Much of this was driven in the late 1930s by Tommy constantly trying to keep the music he presented on his radio show fresh.

In mid-1935, Tommy Dorsey took-over a good band which had been led by the musically astute Joe Haymes, who was neither a showman nor business-savvy, and he built it slowly into a solid dance band that presented a fairly wide variety of music to their audiences. Tommy, who in addition to being a virtuoso trombonist, was an inspired, driven bandleader, and also very definitely a showman and an aggressive businessman. For the first eighteen months of his band’s existence, he worked tirelessly to secure a sponsored network radio show. He knew that such a show would provide the financial base and ongoing public relations push that would move his band from being just a good dance band into being a preeminent swing era attraction that could be sold anywhere and any time to promoters for top money. Their radio show, sponsored by Raleigh and Kool cigarettes, began its run in late 1936 on NBC, and it continued through 1939. By then, Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra were one of the top attractions of the swing era.

One of the great benefits of any band having their own sponsored network radio show was that those shows provided enough money each week to offset the bandleader’s operating expenses, including the largest of them, the salaries of the musicians, singers, arrangers and support staff. In order to maximize their commercial potential, the band’s management team made sure that they remained as busy as possible doing other remunerative work every week. They made commercial recordings, played gigs in nearby locations, and whenever possible, played at a large Manhattan theater. Theaters were where a lot of money could be made in a short time. It was not unusual for a top band like Tommy Dorsey’s, to gross $25,000.00 or more a week ($375,000.00 in today’s dollars) in the late 1930s. Of course to do this, they were required to play as many as six one-hour shows a day, often starting at 10 o’clock a.m., and continuing all day and well into the evening.

Tommy Dorsey was a workaholic. He wanted to work as much as possible with his band, and make as much money as possible, at all times. He also relished doing the public relations work that most successful bandleaders did: they usually did it with reluctance, he did it with apparent joy. He loved nothing more than cooking-up some PR stunt, or putting together special programs to be presented on his radio show. Of course, he was also a man whose musical standards were very high. He made sure that his bands were always well-rehearsed, and had interesting music to play, though commercial considerations often made that difficult. His trombone playing by the late 1930s had reached a pinnacle of virtuosity, honed by playing the horn five or more hours a day for weeks, indeed months, on-end.

By mid-1938, Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra were very successful. Tommy rightly viewed his radio show as the cornerstone of his band’s success. He was deeply involved in the weekly preparation that went into selecting the music, guest performers, and whatever gimmick he and his producers thought would keep that show fresh and interesting for listeners. His band, like every successful band in the swing era, consumed vast amounts of music. Their day-to-day repertoire was constantly evolving with new pop songs being arranged, rehearsed and played for audiences. Tommy would carefully evaluate how well or poorly each such song was being received by his audiences. If a song seemed to be appreciated by audiences, it would stay in the book. If not, it would be retired. As the TD band became more successful, they slowly came to accumulate a core repertoire of songs that were associated with the band, usually because of a hit recording they had made of it. By 1938, the TD recording of “Marie” was a major and ongoing hit. Tommy and his band played it on every gig, and also frequently on sustaining radio broadcasts, and on Tommy’s sponsored radio show. Other successful TD tunes that were played frequently then were: “Song of India” and “Once in a While.” Soon “Boogie Woogie” would become a part of the TD band’s core repertoire.

Most of the pop tunes played by the Dorsey band were arranged by Tommy’s staff arrangers, Paul Wetstein (later Weston), and Axel Stordahl. Although there were a few other arrangers in the Dorsey band (like Freddie Stulce and Carmen Mastren), who submitted charts to Tommy from time to time, Wetstein and Stordahl wrote the vast majority of them. Tommy also gathered arrangements from arrangers outside of the Dorsey band during the late 1930s, including Fletcher Henderson and Benny Carter. Those arrangements, good as they were, had relatively little impact on Tommy’s audiences, though they did provide musical variety, something TD sought. As early as the spring of 1937, Tommy began searching for another arranger to add yet a different musical flavor to his band’s presentation. That arranger was Deane Kincaide. (Above right: September 1937 – Tommy Dorsey celebrates two years as the leader of his own band. Behind him L-R: Paul Wetstein, John Gluskin, an investor in the early TD band, and Axel Stordahl.)

In 1933, Deane Kincaide joined drummer Ben Pollack’s band as a saxophonist, remaining until Pollack disbanded in early 1935. Soon thereafter, he rejoined many of the musicians who had been in the Pollack band in a re-formed band under the nominal leadership of Bing Crosby’s singing younger brother Bob. (The real leader however was the canny Gil Rodin, another ex-Pollack sideman.)

Kincaide came into his own as an arranger with the Bob Crosby band over the next couple of years (1935-1936), often trading ideas with the other two arrangers in that band then, Bob Haggart and Matty Matlock. The three of them had a sharp awareness of early jazz, and often cast vintage jazz tunes in an updated, swing-oriented mode which still retained the flavor of the originals. Kincaide’s late-1930s arrangements, which often included ingenious use of clarinets, and played in 2/4 meter, could be described as semi Dixieland/semi swing. Tommy Dorsey, for his part, seemed to favor music in 2/4 meter, not only in his jazz playing, which had its roots in Dixieland, but also in the writing of many of his arrangers, the most notable being Deane Kincaide, and a bit later, Sy Oliver.

Dorsey first contracted with Kincaide in the spring of 1937 to write a special arrangement for his band on W.C. Handy’s classic from 1917, “Beale Street Blues,” which was included in a special four-record Victor album entitled A Symposium of Swing, which also included music by Benny Goodman (“Sing, Sing, Sing), Bunny Berigan (“I Can’t Get Started”) and Fats Waller (“Honeysuckle Rose”). At that time, Kincaide was working with Woody Herman’s new band. He returned to the Crosby band in September of 1937 and remained until March of 1938, when he joined Tommy Dorsey’s band as a saxophonist and arranger. (Above left: Deane Kincaide.)

It would not be long before TD and Kincaide put their heads together to create a unique reinvention of a somewhat arcane 1928 recording called “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie.”

The music – part one – Roots:

The term “boogie-woogie” is defined as: “a genre of blues music that became popular during the late 1920s, but had developed and been practiced in African-American communities since the 1870s. It was eventually extended from piano to piano duo and trio, guitar, big band, country and western and gospel. While standard blues expresses a wide variety of emotions, boogie-woogie is mainly dance music. The genre has had a significant influence on rhythm and blues and rock and roll.”

“In Texas the piano style that was the antecedent to boogie-woogie was known as ‘fast western.’ The basic bogie-woogie rhythm, which was an outgrowth of ragtime and rural blues, was inspired by the rhythmic clacking of railroad steam locomotives throughout the Deep South in the early 1900s. Music scholars and researchers assert that African American piano players would travel up and down the turpentine camps and entertain workers after a long hard day with upbeat blues. This is where boogie boogie piano music was born.”(2)

A notable recording called “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie” was made by Clarence “Pine Top” Smith on December 29, 1928, in Chicago, and released by Vocalion Records on March 1, 1929. This recording contains a lyric of sorts, which consists of Smith’s spoken instructions to dancers. Rhythmically, it is  similar to the previous year’s hit in the Afro-American community, “Honky Tonk Train Blues,” by Meade “Lux” Lewis, which like “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie” went on to be recorded many times by many artists.(3) This similarity may not be a coincidence, as around that time Lewis and Smith lived in the same boarding house in Chicago.

Boogie-woogie waned in popularity in the black community in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but enjoyed a strong resurgence and its greatest mainstream acclaim in the late 1930s and into the 1940s.  Among its most famous practitioners were pianists Pete Johnson, Albert Ammons and Meade “Lux” Lewis. Other well-known boogie-woogie pianists then were Maurice Rocco and Freddie Slack.  There were also many talented female boogie-woogie pianists during this time, including: Mary Lou Williams, Hadda Brooks, Winifred Atwell, Martha Davis and Hazel Scott.

Several African words have been suggested as having been linguistic precursors to the word “boogie.” Among them are the:

1. Hausa word “Boog”, and
2. Mandingo word “Booga” (both of which mean “to beat”, as in beating a drum);
3. West African word “Bogi” (which means “to dance”);
4. Bantu term “Mbuki Mvuki” (Mbuki: “to take off in flight”; Mvuki: “to dance wildly, as if to shake off one’s clothes.”)

The African origins of these words are consistent with the African-American origin of boogie-woogie as a genre of music.

In sheet music literature prior to 1900, there are at least three examples of the word “boogie” in music titles in the archives of the Library of Congress. In 1901, “Hoogie Boogie” appeared in the title of published sheet music, an early instance where the word “Boogie” occurs in the title of published music. (In 1880, “The Boogie Man” had occurred as the title of a piece of published music.) The first use of “Boogie” on a recording title appears to be a “blue cylinder” recording made by Edison of the American Quartet performing “That Syncopated Boogie Boo” in 1913.

“Boogie” next occurred in the title of Wilbur Sweatman’s April 1917 recording of “Boogie Rag.” However, none of these sheet music or audio recording examples contain the musical elements that would identify them as boogie-woogie. The 1919 recordings (two takes) of “Weary Blues” by the Louisiana Five contained the same boogie-woogie bass figure that appears in the 1915 “Weary Blues” sheet music by Artie Matthews. Scholars have recognized these 1919 recordings as the earliest sound recordings which contain a boogie-woogie bass figure.(4)

The music – part two – Kincaide’s arrangement:

Deane Kincaide’s arrangement of “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie” is both masterful and clever. It is masterful in that Kincaide translated the essence of Smith’s recording into the idiom of swing in a way that utilized every resource available to him in Tommy Dorsey’s virtuoso band. It is clever in that he basically uses the reeds – four clarinets led by Johnny Mince, and a tenor saxophone (Skeets Herfurt), as Pine Top’s right hand at the piano keyboard, and the brass, particularly the open trombones led by TD, as the boogie left hand. The straight-muted brass are then deployed to add a different instrumental color, rhythmic accents, and later in the arrangement when they are played open, sonic power and rhythmic heft.

The introduction is a twelve-bar tract of trilling clarinets first and then chugging trombones. The muted trumpets appear in the second twelve-bar sequence. All of these instruments are played with rhythmic intensity. The third sequence spots pianist Howard Smith playing a bit of boogie which is a combination of his immaculate keyboard technique mixed with the inherent blues funkiness of boogie woogie. I strongly suspect that Kincaide wrote out this solo.

The next section of the arrangement has the trilling clarinets and swirling tenor saxophone playing against the riffing open brass. The ensemble builds to a brassy mini-climax. More chugging follows, this time the clarinets with the tenor saxophone maintain the rhythmic intensity. Then we hear another sonority – the powerful sound of the open trombones, led with gusto by Tommy, then gradually reducing their dynamic level into another brief piano solo.

A photo of Tommy Dorsey and some of his sidemen – October 20, 1938 backstage at the Paramount Theater in Manhattan where the Dorsey band was then performing. L-R: Yank Lawson, Howard Smith, Carmen Mastren, French critic/historian Hughes Panassie’, his colleague Madeleine Gautier, Johnny Mince, Gene Traxler, TD, Moe Purtill and Skeets Herfurt. Check out the gray suede tuxedo jackets. This photo was taken by Charles Peterson.

Kincaide’ s beautifully paced arrangement then presents the trilling reeds and forceful descending open brass passage as a break of sorts, with the rhythm section tacit. A burst of Moe Purtill’s drums bring the band back in, now the open trumpets augment the sound of the reeds as they roll-on against the chugging open trombones. The next sequence, another climax, spots the reeds and open brass against the ascending/descending open trombones (TD prominent). The precision with which the Dorsey band play this and maintain rhythmic intensity is an example of how good (and well rehearsed) this band was.

The final twelve-bar chorus has Tommy on open trombone, playing a velvet-toned bit of blues above a quieter but still rhythmic ensemble, an effective musical denouement. This classic performance ends with a brief coda.

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“Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie”

Composed by Clarence “Pine Top” Smith.(5)

Recorded by Pine Top Smith for Vocalion on December 28, 1928 in Chicago.

Pine Top Smith, solo piano and vocal.

Here is the original, seminal recording that provided the raw musical materials for the Tommy Dorsey/Deane Kincaide arrangement and recording of “Boogie Woogie.” Because Smith’s vocal was indistinct at places on this recording, I have provided it here in writing:

“Boogie Woogie”

Composed by Clarence “Pinetop” Smith; arranged by Deane Kincaide.

Recorded in performance by Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra in late 1942 – early 1943 in Hollywood.

Tommy Dorsey, first and solo trombone, directing (approximate personnel): Ziggy Elman, Jimmy Zito, Al Porcino, Jimmy Blake, trumpets; George Arus, Jimmy Skiles and Dave Jacobs, trombones; Johnny Bothwell, first alto saxophone; Harry Schuchman, alto saxophone; Don Lodice and Henry “Heinie” Beau, tenor saxophones; Bruce Snyder, baritone saxophone; (All saxophonists play clarinet except Don Lodice who plays tenor saxophone.) Milt Raskin, piano; Clark Yocum, guitar; Phil Stephens, bass; Buddy Rich, drums.

Story and music:

By the time this recording was made at the end of 1942 or the beginning of 1943, Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra had played “Boogie Woogie” hundreds of times. Their 1938 Victor recording of it was by then a multi-million seller. Audiences loved it.

The military draft during World War II was thinning the ranks of every big band. In addition, travel had become difficult with gasoline and rubber rationing in the U.S. TD was able to deal with these issues by headquartering his band in Hollywood, where they would remain for most of the time until the end of hostilities, in the summer of 1945. His management team had landed a lucrative contract for the Dorsey band to make movies at M-G-M. From 1941 through 1946, Tommy and his band appeared in seven feature films.

Despite these wartime challenges, demand for the music of the swing bands was great. People on the home front, often working overtime in War-related industries, were making more money than they ever had before. They wanted to listen to the music of swing bands on radio, on records, in movie theaters, and whenever they could manage it, at a ballroom.

This performance of “Boogie Woogie” reveals that the Dorsey ensemble now played it with even more vigor than on the Victor record. The tempo is faster, the ensembles are more powerful, the piano solos are now improvised by Milt Raskin, and the drumming has much more heft, courtesy of Buddy Rich. Even TD lets loose with some rambunctious improvised trombone toward the end of the performance. (Above right: Tommy Dorsey and Buddy Rich in the early 1940s.)

The recordings presented with this post were digitally remastered by Mike Zirpolo.

Notes and links:

(1) The 1928 recording by Clarence “Pine Top” Smith of “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie” was the source of the arrangement that Deane Kincaide wrote for Tommy Dorsey’s band in 1938 that became a big hit. (Kincaide also recalled using a piano sheet music copy of what was on that recording.) The TD version was called simply “Boogie Woogie,” and it remained a part of the permanent repertoire of the Tommy Dorsey band. The ever-alert Gil Rodin made sure the Bob Crosby band soon had their own boogie-woogie material to play, a Matty Matlock arrangement of Meade “Lux” Lewis’s “Honky Tonk Train Blues,” which was recorded on October 19, 1938 with Bob Zurke at the piano.

Regrettably, just as his recording of “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie” was beginning to become popular, Pine Top Smith was killed by a stray bullet in a dance hall fight in Chicago on March 15, 1929. He was only 24 years old.

(2) The synopsis of the origins of boogie-woogie comes from the Wikipedia post on it.

(3) The information on “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie” was extracted from the Wikipedia post on it.

(4) Additional information about the linguistic precursors of the term boogie-woogie comes from the Wikipedia post on it.

(5) Here is a link to a concise summary of Pine Top Smith’s life: https://blues.fandom.com/wiki/Pinetop_Smith

Here are links to other great Tommy Dorsey/Deane Kincaide performances:

https://swingandbeyond.com/2020/08/04/tin-roof-blues-1938-tommy-dorsey-deane-kincaide-with-yank-lawson-johnny-mince-and-babe-russin/

https://swingandbeyond.com/2023/12/11/washboard-blues-1938-tommy-dorsey-deane-kincaide-with-johnny-mince-and-skeets-herfurt/

https://swingandbeyond.com/2019/03/04/milenberg-joys-1939-tommy-dorsey/

https://swingandbeyond.com/2025/02/05/swing-low-sweet-chariot-1941-tommy-dorsey-deane-kincaide-with-ziggy-elman-johnny-mince-don-lodice-and-buddy-rich/